George Berkeley

George Berkeley (12 March 1685-14 January 1753) was an Irish Anglican bishop and philosopher who advanced the theory of "subjective idealism", a theory that he had created in opposition to John Locke's empiricist philosophy.

Biography
George Berkeley was born on 12 March 1685 in County Kilkenny, Ireland to an Anglican Protestant family. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and, in 1709, he published his first major work, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he discussed the limitations of human vision. He then published A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in 1713. In the latter work, his views were held by Philonous ("lover of mind"), while his opponents' views (including the "atheistic" views of John Locke) were held by Hylas ("matter"). Berkeley believed that things exist only through perception, and that God does the perceiving when humans cannot; his approach to empiricism became the basis for his own philosophy of "subjective idealism". He also opposed Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time, and motion in his 1721 work On Motion, and Berkeley's arguments were a precursor to those of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein. He published the Christian apologetic Alciphron in 1732 and the calculus critique The Analyst two years later, and he completed his final major philosophical work, Siris, in 1744.